Friday's Sun column is about a Baltimore nonprofit I had never heard of, but one that appears to be doing important work, with the financial support of several city foundations and partners.
Baltimore's Promise is all about helping a specific group of children and young adults, 14 to 24 years old, survive poverty, unstable family life, trauma, depression and all other obstacles. Older youth, particularly boys becoming men, are at higher risk of failure and violence than any other group in the city, and yet, as Baltimore's Promise found in its foundational research, they are the most under-served.
In my reading of research on the health and well-being of young Black men, I came across numerous studies on their hard road to manhood. Recent, researchers conducted a study of that demographic group in Kansas City. The average age of those in the study was 23, and surveyors specifically asked them about any traumatic experiences they might have had.
From the findings: "Participants commonly did not know their average monthly household income, although 27% reported more than $3,000 per month. One-third of participants had no health insurance. The most commonly reported types of trauma experienced were being threatened with a weapon and losing a loved one to accident, suicide or homicide."
Here's another finding, from an NIH-CDC study: "An estimated 321,566 children in the United States lost a parent to drug overdose from 2011 to 2021. The rate of children who experienced this loss more than doubled during this period, from approximately 27 to 63 children per 100,000. The highest number of affected children were those with non-Hispanic white parents, but communities of color and tribal communities were disproportionately affected."
It has occurred to me a million times — how different from what we consider "normal" are the lives of so many children in Baltimore and other cities that decades ago experienced segregation, racism, disinvestment and white flight.
My information does not come from watching exploitative crime shows, but from nearly 50 years of reporting on Baltimore life, talking to people of all ages, and specifically to all those engaged in helping young people survive or adult ex-offenders get to a better place. The city is full of people who do that important work while others just gripe about Baltimore's many problems or even take glee in them as evidence of Democratic, Great Society failure. (Republican politicians have had nothing to do with the city for at least six decades now, unless you include Larry Hogan's brief interest: helping to restore order after the Freddie Gray uprising before killing the Red Line and State Center projects.)
Being in the helping professions — doctor, nurse, social worker, community organizer, big brother or sister, teacher or mentor — is not for the weak. And probably the toughest part of those tough jobs is experiencing loss or setbacks as the people you're trying to help fail or even die. That is traumatic, too, and, as you'll see from the column, the staff at Baltimore's Promise has had that experience (with Montaze Cooper, in photos above) in just the last year. But the work goes on. Follow this link for more information about this organization.
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